'It won't be over until Brian . . . is home.'

Left: Brian Ivers and his wife, Heather, who is pregnant with their third child. Right: Peter Ivers reads a letter from his son, Brian.

For one Melbourne father, the war in Iraq has meant weeks of hearing little and fearing the worst. David Rood reports.

When Melbourne opened the morning papers to images of American prisoners of war and dead coalition soldiers a few weeks ago, Peter Ivers was convinced his son Brian was one of them.

Most days Mr Ivers tries hard to avoid the war. With Brian serving in the US Marines, he doesn't want to know what's happening.

Inevitably, he relents and turns on the little radio that sits on the kitchen table of his Pascoe Vale unit.

"I don't watch the television and then I sort of sneak on the wireless . . . you hear 'there's one marine killed' and you always think it's going to be yours," the 73-year-old says.

"I don't know how other people cop it but I don't cop it too good."");document.write("

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Mr Ivers regrets the raw emotion that arises when he talks about his son. He says it isn't the style of someone who worked all his life around the Flemington racetrack.

"I've been a knockabout bloke. I thought I had more guts than to get shook up over something I have no control over," he says. "I wouldn't wish this on anyone."

His son grew up in Carlton and Ascot Vale, and first went to the US as a 15-year-old exchange student. He met his wife, Heather, when he returned to America to study law.

He became a US citizen and was working as a policeman when his reserve marine battalion was called up following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Brian, now 34, served in the first Gulf War. Mr Ivers says the hardest thing to deal with is not knowing.

Yesterday morning, he heard his son's voice for the first time in more than two months on Melbourne radio.

The last time they spoke was the night before Brian was deployed to the Persian Gulf as a platoon sergeant with the Second Battalion, Fox Company.

"I nearly flipped when they rang me up from the ABC in the morning and said 'Are you Peter Ivers? Have you got a son?' I said 'Oh Jesus'. Naturally I thought the worst."

The powerful stories Brian told in the radio interview were the first Mr Ivers had heard of his son's war. Brian talked about the heavy fighting he had experienced - "just like in (the movie) Black Hawk Down" - and the Iraqi tactic of using civilians loaded into cars on the battlefield.

"And these cars started pelting down the freeway, and they were ramming our machine-gun positions," Brian told 774 ABC.

"And so we were opening up on these cars, and literally they were ramming into the sandbags. My marines were just lucky to get out of there alive.

"It was very traumatic for the marines, because we're sitting there, we're trying to protect ourselves, and they're doing that. We couldn't understand why they were doing that," he said.

As Brian spoke about losing his best mate in battle, Mr Ivers broke down.

"They're burying him today in Utah and the whole state's coming out for that. But the men took it very, very difficult," Brian said.

"My wife's pregnant. If we have a baby boy, we're going to call him Jim. His name was Jim Crawley, Sergeant Jim Crawley, and we're going to call (the baby) Jim Crawley Ivers as a tribute."

Mr Ivers speaks with pride about his son and his bookshelf is full of photographs of Brian's sons, George, 4, and David, 2. He speaks with Heather in the US every week.

"She's got a lot more guts than me," Mr Ivers says. "She's got the two little blokes and she has only got six weeks to go with the next one."

The last letter Mr Ivers received from his son, from "somewhere in Kuwait", took five weeks to arrive. In it, Brian tells about the conditions in the desert camp, the high morale of his troops, and his family.

The letter is signed Linus, a childhood nickname for the boy who used to follow his father around, carrying a blanket.

Mr Ivers is reluctant to talk about his war stance beyond saying "it is just".

"I've got a vested interest, haven't I? But, yeah I think they should have gone there. That can't go on forever and ever, you can't have people living like that."

He has even less to say about the anti-war movement. "What I think you wouldn't want to put in print," he says with finality.

For the moment Mr Ivers is still avoiding switching on the television. "They say it's all over now," he says. "It won't be over until Brian rings me up when he's home."